How Likely Is Your Partner to Cheat?

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A fear of sexual failure combined with a lack of concern about
sexual consequences makes both men and women more likely to cheat
on their partners, a new study finds.

While it may seem counterintuitive that someone with performance
anxiety would seek out something
extra on the side, insecure cheaters might look for risky
situations to boost their sexual arousal, researchers reported
online June 11 in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior. Or
they may be trying to avoid the baggage of their sexual anxiety.

"People who score high on this [trait] may feel less pressure
when they're engaging with a person who doesn't know their sexual
history," study researcher Kristen Mark, a doctoral candidate at
Indiana University, told LiveScience.

Identifying infidelity

Estimates of how many cheaters exist differ based on how cheating
is defined. However, several nationally representative studies in
the 1990s put the numbers at about 20 percent to 25 percent of
men and 10 percent to 15 percent of women. In the past five to
seven years, however, the cheating gender gap has closed, Mark
said, with women cheating at similar rates as men. [ 10
Surprising Sex Statistics ]

Numerous factors play a role in infidelity, including money (high
earners are
more likely to cheat ) and the health of the couple's
relationship (partners in ill relationships are more likely to
stray). But the new study finds that a person's sexual
personality is more important than demographic or relationship
factors.

Using an online survey, Mark and her colleagues asked 506
monogamous men and 416 monogamous women about their relationship
quality, sexual behaviors and whether they'd cheated in their
current relationship. The median age of the study participants
was 31, and half were married.

Both genders cheated at similar levels, the survey revealed: 23
percent of men and 19 percent of the women said they had done
something sexual with a third party that could
jeopardize their relationship if their partner ever found
out. People who had cheated were about half as likely to be
religious than non-cheaters, and slightly more likely to be
employed. Unsurprisingly, cheating was also associated with
unhappy relationships.

Sexual personality

But most important of all were the participants' sexual
personalities. Men who reported that they easily became sexually
excited were more likely to cheat. For every unit increase in
sexual
excitability, propensity to stray went up 4 percent. Women's
sexual excitability wasn't related to cheating, though their
relationship satisfaction was. Being unhappy in a relationship or
feeling incompatible with a partner increased the likelihood that
a woman would cheat by between 2.6 percent and 2.9 percent.

For both men and women, fear of sexual consequences and anxiety
about sexual performance influenced infidelity. When people had
little concern about the consequences of sex — including
pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases and being caught
Tweeting pictures of your crotch to strangers — they were
more likely to step out on their partner. One unit of increase in
concern on this scale made women 13 percent less likely to cheat
and men 7 percent less likely to cheat.

Anxiety about one's own sexual performance had the opposite
effect. People who worried a lot about their ability to stay
aroused or orgasm cheated more often —women by 8 percent for
every increase in concern about their sexual function and men by
6 percent.

Your cheatin' heart

The important takeaway, Mark said, is that understanding sexual
personality is important to understanding infidelity. If you're
worried about, say,
marrying a politician because he or she might cheat on you,
you might be better off looking at the person's attitudes in bed
than his or her day job.

"We found that some of those demographics were important," Mark
said. "But once you included all these other variables, we
realized quickly that they weren't nearly as important, and their
relative importance disappeared."